Cabin in the Woods (2012)

SPOILERS! SPOILERS, I SAY!!! (On which, more later, but, if you don’t want to know the score &c…..)

Like my friend, the writer and man Mark Blackmore, I’ve recently been watching this film, which seems to have been somewhat of a marmite affair. I’ve seen several comments on twitter from people whose opinions on these sorts of things I usually agree with, who thought it awful, some of whom, it seemed, had reached this verdict at the point (presumably) the spoilerphobes wanted to proctect us from. This is obviously fair enough, and to each their own, of course, but personally, I’ll say at once that I agree with all of Mr Blackmore’s facts.

This spoilers business is interesting. Especially on twitter, the avoidance of spoilers seems recently to have attained an almost hysterically giddy importance; the capo di tutti capi in recent TV being of course Moffat-era Doctor Who. And yet, if something depends on the surprise, is it really good? I came to Doctor Who as a fan (as opposed to a viewer) at the time Tom Baker was regenerating into Peter Davison; by the time I caught up on many of the previous episodes I’d never seen, I knew every turn of the story in detail: and some of those episodes remain my favourites and most rewatched. (Also: who’s watched The Sixth Sense more than once? Honestly?)

So. I avoided spoilers, didn’t read anything online, and yet, and but, for unavoiable reasons, before I watched the DVD, I bought a copy of it, and thus, unavoidably, saw the DVD cover above, which was also, I think, the film poster.

“Aha!” I thought, “That’s spoiled it straight away, though, hasn’t it?” (My other great spoiler moments have been Triangle (which was spoiled by the DVD cover) and After Life, which was spoiled by the Director on the DVD, of which more on both shortly…)

And yet, there’s nothing in the “spoilers” that would have ruined this for me. The review on the SFX magazine website, written by someone who knows more about genre films, and is a better writer than I’ll ever be, said: “It’s a film that’s difficult to describe without spoilers, despite the fact that, audaciously, you’re let in on the main secret – or at least, handed the first piece of the puzzle – in the opening scene.” How have we reached a world when that sentence can even begin to make sense??? If you like horror films, and Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, and an ultimatlely Lovecraftian explanation as to why horror films are so often poor, you’ll probaly like this, and, if not, you probably won’t, and spoilers be damned…

Related

Glad you liked Cabin in the Woods, which is possibly the best film I’ve seen this year. This spoilers business seems to have become a monster over the past few years, a giant monster that lives beneath us and must be worshiped lest it destroy us all (spoilers!). But I care not, and never have, whether I know which way something is going. Yet again I find myself tragically out of step with society as a whole. However, science says you and I are right about this…